American Movie

May 22, 2020 — This week’s round features the story behind John Cassavetes’s debut feature and conversations with Dan Sallitt and Jonathan Rosenbaum.

May 12, 2020 — In the early 1950s, director John Sturges, then under contract at MGM, read a condensed version of Paul Brickhill’s memoir The Great Escape, which details the mass escape of downed fighter pilots from the German prisoner-of-war camp Stalag Luft III...

May 11, 2020 — This week’s round comes loaded with lists: 100 novels about cinema, fifty novelizations, and dozens of Sheila O’Malley’s favorite biographies.

May 8, 2020 — The opening and closing credits in a film are a form of housekeeping, fulfilling a legal obligation to compile the names of cast and crew who made the final product possible. Visionary designer Saul Bass saw the aesthetic potential in...

May 4, 2020 — “You’ve never seen prairie grass with the wind leaning on it, have you, Diz?”Jean Arthur asks this poetic, expressively peculiar question of Thomas Mitchell in Frank Capra’s 1939 Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and we understand her yearning for truth...

Apr 30, 2020 — Check out what’s in store next month on our streaming service!

Apr 24, 2020 — Paul Schrader and Petra Costa are among the filmmakers determined to make the most of what they’ve got during lockdown.

Apr 20, 2020 — This month sees new books by and about Woody Allen, Miranda July, and Michael Snow as well as fresh translations and collections of criticism.

Apr 16, 2020 — Performances If Richard Milhous Nixon, the thirty-sixth president, continues to inspire a morbid fascination in some of us, the reasons for this extend beyond the obviously exceptional aspects of his career—his reelection in 1972, one of the largest landslide victories...

Apr 14, 2020 — The late filmmaker admired by Jonas Mekas, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and George Lucas cofounded Canyon Cinema and the San Francisco Cinematheque.